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The article is kind of incomplete and concentrating more on the circumstances (nazis, war, ..) then his actual inventions.

- He invented the first turing complete computer the Z3 which was finished in 1941, the Z4 (which was based on the Z3 was the first commercial computer)

- He is also responsible for the first high level computing language - Planalkül

The wikipedia article on him has some better information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse

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Small correction: "Plankalkül" which translates to "plan calculus"

One of the more fascinating things about the history of computing is vacuum tubes where first commercially available in 1920 and several computing devices where so quickly built from them. When you look at how unstable early vacuum tubes actually where the gap where a computer was possible and when the first one was built was fairly small.

they are quite reliable if you don't turn them off which is what colossus did

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